In praise of Arab ‘Defeat’: another reading of Arab struggle

Abstract

This article seeks to detach the 2011 Arab uprisings from an ontology of revolution and resistance that relegates them only to a discourse of success and failure. While the grievances of street mobilization of millions of protesters are familiar, they cannot be contained in a narrative that simply measures them against a Western prototype of democracy or a blueprint of revolutionary practice. Such an analysis, I argue, dilutes the contextual specificity of these events by subsuming them into an exhaustive model they either conform to or deviate from. Instead, I ask, what if we opened up the archive to read these events differently? What if we wrote against the grain and tempo of that dominant archive to demystify Arab societies and evoke a long view of Arab protest, a view that is not obsessed with interpretive ease and an external political expediency? Drawing on a historical record of continuous struggle in Morocco and using the media work of Hicham Lasri as an example, this article provides an alternative reflection on the necessity to read these uprisings as a persisting expression of a people’s demand for agency, dignity, and possibility in societies still afflicted by the burdens of autocracy, corruption, and neoliberalism and tormented by their quest for political rights and cultural independence. The ‘Arab Spring’ in this analysis ceases to be a singular event or a fleeting spectacle of revolutionary potential.